In recent years, the popularity of digital cameras has led to a flourish of personal digital images. For example, Kodak Gallery, Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa Web Album host millions of new personal images uploaded every month. With most digital cameras capable of capturing video clips, a typical user collection may contain both digital still images and digital video images.
Photo slideshows with music have been very popular for sharing memories. The photos can be panned and zoomed, with special effects applied to present a more pleasing and meaningful experience. There are many applications that will create slideshows automatically from a digital image collection containing still and video images (e.g., Muvee). With such applications, a user simply picks the digital media assets (i.e., still images, videos, and music) that he/she wants to include and the slideshow application applies effects that match a theme that the user selected. There is a myriad of effects that can be utilized when transitioning from one image to another image or from a still image to a video. Often the transition from still images to video (and from video to still images) is abrupt and interrupts the flow of the presentation. Conventional transitions introduce a perceived “break” in the presentation by displaying a still image and then playing the video with very little blending of the two. This problem is not well addressed even with fade-in effects.
A fast-emerging trend in digital photography and social network is face tagging. The availability face-tagged photos can help establish correspondence between media streams of photos and videos captured at different times and locations. As a result, many web and desktop computer applications have started to automate face tagging and grouping of the individuals in a photo collection. For example, Picasa Face Movie uses the faces to transition between still photos of the same person by aligning the faces that have been located and tagged in the still photos such that the still photos are shown with the person's faces at a fixed size and location across all the still photos.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,302,113 to Pilu et al., entitled “Displaying digital images,” discloses a method of displaying digital images that includes the steps of determining an extent of similarity between a first image part and a second image part, determining a transition type, displaying the first image part and transitioning to displaying the second image part using a determined transition type, the second image part being selected at least partly based on a determined extent of similarity between the first image part and the second image part, in which the viewpoint of an image part is moved during the transition. The transition type is determined from one or more of a dissolve, a wipe, a blind, and a random dissolve.
Morphing is a special image processing technique that creates a smooth, controlled transformation from one image into another. The morphing effect is widely used for various tasks ranging from generation of fancy special effects, smoothing transitions between video frames to funny warping of faces. Other applications of morphing include mixing parent's images to predict what their child will look like, or recreating and image of a past hero from images of his descendants. A classic example of a morphing transformation is shown in the well-known “Black or White” video clip by Michael Jackson, where the faces of different people change from one into another.
Stoik MorphMan is a commercial software product with video-to-video morphing features, performed in a sequence of steps that involve substantial manual user interaction: 1) import movie clips as Source and Target for morphing project, 2) use a sequence browser to scroll sequence of morphs between corresponding frames of input clips, 3) tune source and target clips to choose interval for morphing, 4) set key markers and key frames for manual adjustment of morphing transition in intermediate frames of the sequence, 5) apply a propagate function which uses a motion estimation algorithm to automatically place markers around moving objects, and 6) use a canvas layer that allows simple video compositing directly. While MorphMan is accessible even for users who are not professional video engineers, for example, parents who make “kindergarten-to-college” video transition from their kid's photos, it still requires manual intervention by an operator to guide the morphing process.
In order to create a satisfying user experience, there is a need to produce a smooth and pleasing transition between still photos and video automatically and in particular when people are present in both the still photo and the video.